Data from: Inter-sexual phenotypic divergence is correlated with habitat structure in an invasive lizard

Organisms faced with environmental change must adapt or go extinct.
Adaptive change can arise through adaptive evolution, phenotypic
plasticity, and the potentially complex interaction between these factors.
In dioecious species, this may be further complicated by differences in
the strength and direction of adaptive responses in males and females.
Adaptation can be constrained by differences in the direction of selection
between the sexes, though sexual dimorphism in adaptive evolution and/or
phenotypic plasticity can also potentially facilitate adaptation to
environmental change through reducing intraspecific competition and
enhancing population persistence. In invasive species, the constraints
imposed by inter-specific competition on intra-specific niche divergence
may be shed by ecological release. In such conditions, we can expect high
potential for inter-sexual divergence in adaptive change, possibly
augmenting invasiveness. In this study, we investigate the potential for
sexually divergent adaptive change in invasive populations of the Green
Anole, Anolis carolinensis, in the Ogasawara Islands, an oceanic
archipelago in Japan. We find that limb length is correlated with
variation in habitat structure across the islands in male lizards, but not
in female lizards. We suggest that the resulting variation in sexual
dimorphism is driven by exploitation of the available niche space, with
male habitat use diverging further from that of females where local
conditions allow. These findings represent evidence that community-level
patterns observed among other anole species are mirrored by local,
intra-specific patterns in this population, and add to growing evidence of
the importance of ecological drivers of sexual dimorphism.